Now, 30 years after the piece riled a San Francisco still raw from the 1978 killings of Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, "Portrait of George" is coming home to the city that commissioned then rejected it.

Purchased by SFMOMA from a private estate for an undisclosed sum, this signal work of Northern California art goes on view Friday at the museum in a gallery dedicated to the work of the famed Benicia funk artist who died of cancer in 1992 at 62.

Benezra - who studied at UC Davis, a hotbed of invention where Arneson was on the faculty - was a graduate student at Stanford University in 1981 when the Arneson-Moscone controversy erupted. He first saw the multicolored, almost 8-foot-tall statue in a storage room at the old SFMOMA on Van Ness Avenue.

ARENSON'S BUST/C/19AUG97/MN/HO--Zane Mackin of Chico inspects the inscriptions on the pedestal of the bust of George Moscone by sculptor Robert Arneson at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park in this file photo taken May 20, 1992. less

ARENSON'S BUST/C/19AUG97/MN/HO--Zane Mackin of Chico inspects the inscriptions on the pedestal of the bust of George Moscone by sculptor Robert Arneson at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park in this file ... more

Photo: Steve Castillo, Chronicle Photo By Steve Castill

SFMOMA to display divisive George Moscone bust

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Receiving death threats

The pastel-hued pedestal - incised graffiti-like with everything from Moscone's alma mater to the Twinkies associated with killer Dan White's consumption of sugary junk food that supposedly blurred his senses - shocked people. Arneson, who simply said he was a realist sculptor who "doesn't deal with illusion," received death threats.

"It's always struck me as incredibly powerful," said Benezra, standing in front of "Portrait of George" the other morning. He gazed up at the giant clay head, a politician's grinning visage colored Pollock-like in pinks, grays and blues. "You hope a work of art will retain that over time. It's amazing how powerful this is all these years later."

The sculpture, a cornerstone of the Bay Area and California collection the museum intends to grow as part of its $480 million expansion, "reminds people of the history," Benezra said. "After the 1906 earthquake, this was probably the most traumatic moment in the history of San Francisco."

Then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein directed the Arts Commission, which had commissioned the piece and paid Arneson half of the $37,000 fee, to reject it unless he agreed to change the pedestal. In 2000, now-Sen. Feinstein told Chronicle staff writer Mike Weiss that because of the pain and polarization in the city after the Jonestown massacre, the assassinations and the White Night riots, "I did not feel it was appropriate public art at the time. And I felt and feel very strongly about Gina (Moscone) and the family and what they had gone through."

Arneson, who was known for his irreverence and comic bite and obviously wasn't going to cast a heroic bronze, refused to alter the piece and returned the fee. San Francisco art dealer Foster Goldstrom snapped up the sculpture for $50,000.

Benezra, who remembers Arneson talking to him about ancient Roman sculptors inscribing the pedestals of commemorative busts, couldn't persuade Goldstrom to loan the piece for an Arneson retrospective he put on as a rookie curator at Iowa's Des Moines Art Center in 1985. The work, which was shown around the country sporadically over the years, sat in a New York warehouse for several years until a divorce judge ordered Goldstrom and his estranged wife, Monique, to sell some art to pay lawyer fees.

Pursuing the piece

In 1997, Jay Cooper, a Phoenix doctor and collector who owned some of Arneson's work, wandered into a La Jolla (San Diego County) art gallery with his wife, Joyce. They got to talking with the owner, who had heard "Portrait of George" was available. The Coopers bought the bust that day for $155,000.

Over the past decade, Benezra had inquired repeatedly if the Coopers wanted to sell the piece (Jay Cooper died in 2004). Seeing it again last year at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, the director and SFMOMA's chief curator, Gary Garrels, gave it another shot.

"This time the inquiries bore fruit," said Benezra, noting that you have a better chance of buying a work from a private owner when it's already out of the house.

Arneson knew that the sculpture, which the late Chronicle critic Allan Temko praised as "a potent piece of social commentary that, rather, than deify Moscone, tells the truth of his life and death," would stir strong reactions. When he showed the mayor's widow the bust in his Benicia studio (she approved), he covered up the pedestal so as not to upset her. But he was surprised by the intensity of the outrage it produced.

"He believed the story had to be there," said Arneson's widow, artist Sandra Shannonhouse. "Bob was really committed to remembering. But people weren't ready to remember."

Creating this controversial piece, added Shannonhouse, who's excited and moved to see the work at SFMOMA, "really made him reassess his attitude about art and what it could be."

Moscone son's view

Christopher Moscone, who was 16 when White killed his father and Milk, doesn't plan to stop by SFMOMA to see the sculpture, which pained his family and friends three decades ago. But it's OK by him that it's back.

"It was a slap in the face to me, my mother, brother and sisters. Completely insensitive and just not appropriate for public art," said Moscone, who thinks the city simply hired the wrong guy for the job and was right to reject Arneson's piece, which he called cartoonish and demeaning. "But with the passage of time, I think this is probably a good place for it now. Artists want to provoke passion and feeling, and he definitely achieved that."

After the Moscone flap and the start of his illness, Arneson's often whimsical art focused more on big issues such as nuclear disarmament. "His work could still be terribly funny, but it was also terribly serious," Benezra said.

" 'Portrait of George,' " he added, "had to be here. It had to be here."

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